Micron P420 Setup for PernixData

John Lucio over at Micron was kind enough to hook me with a couple of Micron P420 PCIe SSD cards to test in my lab. I do a lot of work with Horizon View and my poor little NAS wouldn’t be able to handle linked clones without PernixData, so I was excited to see the difference between a PCIe SSD and the regular SSDs I use.

Here is the Micron P420. For an IT guy, this is pure crack.

It was easy enough to fit on my SuperMicro X9SCM-IIF-O motherboard. I have plenty of room for the SSD and a 4-port NIC add-on card. I could probably cram some more cards in there if I had to.

Once I booted up, I went to the PernixData Tab on the Hosts and Clusters view of my vCenter C# client. I’m down-reved to to ESX 5.1 for some View work I am doing. No, I don’t use the web client if I can avoid it!

The first thing to do is click Create Flash Cluster so that I have some fault tolerance for my caching:

I have a cluster, now I Add Devices:

I pick the 2 Micron cards, which showed up with no fuss:

You can select all if you need to for a large deployment:

The click Add Datastores and pick which LUNs you want to add horsepower to. Make sure to pick Write Through as the write policy, that’s where the sauce is.

Here is how much data was kept from hammering my NAS, it really adds up! App01 runs the vHipster Minecraft server, so all is good.

Nice information. I have a shuttle SZ77R5 barebone chassis with a similar setup. I found the P420m needs good airflow and these chassis don’t have sufficient fan to pull air over it. I installed a PCI fan next to mine where the fan was sitting over the ASIC heat sink. This keeps the card much cooler and performing optimally.